[Thus spake Rick Kelly ("RK: ") 6:21pm...]
RK: >You should use 'type' or 'command -[V|v]' not 'which', the latter is posix.
RK: >Both will tell you what the shell will actually do, not what some other
RK: >program thinks it might do.
RK:
RK: I've been using "which" since before posix meant anything. I've written
RK: aliases for which with "type". And "type" is just an alias for "whence".
Hey, Rick!
I believe David meant 'the latter of "type" and "command -[V|v]"', not
meaning to count 'which' among "the latter" (and it would have been
"the last", anyway, as there would have been a reference to one of more
than two items).
'type', 'whence', whatever. "which" has always been a shell script
which would do the unwanted, in my eyes.
For a "user-friendly shell", I tend to compile bash at first opportunity,
but I'm far from crippled using either sh or csh. I wouldn't cry if
linedit were to vanish altogether from sh. I also wouldn't cry if
ksh were to promptly vanish in a puff of logic.
My complaint about ksh was that (remember, now, that csh was the first
of them to have job control!) you explicitly had to type 'fg %job'
instead of '%job'. Being that ksh got job control AFTER csh (remember,
now, that Berkeley implemented true job control far prior to AT&T),
I will be so bold as to state that ksh got it wrong from the outset
and it hasn't yet been fixed. The history references are also cumbersome
by comparison ("But That's Okay [TM] because ksh has CLE built in."
Okay, whatever...).
The other issue it used to have that was a serious annoyance was that
it did not support {} expansion. This, I believe, HAS been fixed at
some point.
--*greywolf;
--
PAM -- "What a totally excellent discovery...NOT!"